BEST OF WEEK: Cathedral.

We read the short story "Cathedral" in class. By the end of our discussion about it, as a class we reached the conclusion that language can create limitations to the conveying of experience. The narrator of the story purposely uses ambiguous language (i.e. "it's really something") to avoid putting his epiphany in concrete terms. In concrete terms, the sense of an epiphany is no longer presented, merely a series of events, and it would also put the narrator out of his normal voice, dissolving the credibility of the story.

There isn't a language in the world that would be able to convey the experience of epiphany, of sudden realization. And yet the language is needed to guide the reader towards the epiphany. Perhaps purposely ambiguous language can provide insight because it reflects the natural ambiguity of life itself. Then it wouldn't be the language that is limiting in the expressing of metaphysical experience, but the tendency to mentally put concepts in terms of time and space. For example, in the previous sentence, i'm describing ideas/concepts, and i have them put in time and space, which act like a physical sort of canvas, or box, into which something purely conceptual is being placed into.

In my writing, I could use ambiguous language to aid in the expression of my experiences as well. This would take much work however, as if done poorly, the effect is lost, and there is nothing concrete to back up the failed technique.

What If? -irony.

In class we were talking about irony. Irony is an interesting concept. By Wikipedia definition "..from the Ancient Greek εἰρωνεία eirōneía, meaning hypocrisy, deception, or feigned ignorance) is a situation, literary technique, or rhetorical device, in which there is an incongruity, discordance, or unintended connection with truth, that goes strikingly beyond the most simple and evident meaning of words or action."

My thinking is this: What if everything we do, every single human or non-human action and thought, in some way ironic? By definition, humanity would either have some sort of incongruity, discordance, or unintentionally hint at Truth. By all of these three facets of the definition, humanity, and our entire existence, is either fundamentally illogical, and also probably completely unaware of Truth.

The first seems to be true. Half of humanity's history doesn't make sense from a single point of view. Easy example, the Holocaust. It makes no sense on the road of progress, especially after the enlightenment period happening, with religion existent especially. Aren't the ideals of religion supposed to stop these sorts of things from occurring? These events do have causes and effects, and reasons behind them, and motivations, if looked at in a different frame.

Strangely though, none of our existence as a species in general is logical. We don't think we are living meaninglessly, we believe in Progress. And for the course of our history we have been Progressing. Progressing towards what? How can you progress without a goal? We don't know what our goal is. Maybe that goal is to figure out why we are here, then hell we're doing the wrong thing.

Assuming the previous paragraph true, than the ironic thing to impose on top of it would be that our lives DON'T have meaning after all, that we spend our lives trying to find something that's not there. That absence of meaning is a Truth.

Now everything being ironic would render everybody and everything naive to the reality to the world. Then what if another layer was also existent? Suppose we were all acutely AWARE of our ironic lives. We would be able to see our asinine existence, but we wouldn't be able to do anything about it. We would know we are living ironic lives, and would ironically continue living them.

Its ironic, because in reading that last paragraph, the reader is now slightly aware, or looking for cues of such irony in their life. Here's the scary part? What if all of the ideas previously written without serious contemplation or reasoning actually all TRUE. There would be no way to escape the irony. We would be living lives, each pitiful life alive, but with no purpose to be alive, and completely aware of it. And nothing could be done about it without being ironic. Suicide would have to be ironic; the individual transcending from an existence of no meaning, to a 'non-existence' of still no meaning. Everyone would still have to (ironically) go on with daily business and continue our Progress inventing atom bombs, and super bombs, and uber bombs, and uber computers, and computer bombs, etc.

And with the feeling of successfully describing the world in a short blog post, I bid you all farewell.

Connection: Post-Modernism/Modernism and Bioshock

During our class's discussion, outlining the differences between modernism and postmodernism, I kept referring all the new concepts in terms of 'Bioshock' a video game designed for the xbox360 console. I have been playing this game recently on account of a recommendation by my friend for its artistic value.

The general premise of this first person shooter, macabre style game is as follows: You are a man who has just survived a plane crash in the middle of the Atlantic. It is set in the 1960s. In the water, you stumble upon a strange construction, in which, a bathysphere takes you down to a submerged city, built by 'Andrew Ryan' to escape the confines of 'big society and its phony ethics, where great men can be great'. Upon your arrival, you are contacted via portable radio by a man called 'Atlas' who guides you throughout the city, Rapture, filled with its crazed, and very violent inhabitants. The opening sequence is provided with the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeNtHY8Igf0

In most respects, Bioshock is presented in a very modernist way. Each new 'experience' or completed mission, reveals something about yourself as a character, or what had happened to the city, and characters (like Andrew Ryan), who have left obvious visible marks, have contributed to the demise of Rapture. So is the concept of memory. Periodically throughout the game, random sepia images, of maybe a house, or what can be assumed maybe a family, are shown, as flashbacks. Later on in the game, after being betrayed by Atlas, you discover none of those memories are real, they are a product of mental conditioning, and that you are playing as something sort of a biological experiment, created in a lab. If according to Proust a life of memory is the only chance for a life of meaning, then the life of this character no longer has any. This happens to be ironic, as you are trying to find meaning, the motivation for playing the game, which is the proper response to the human condition in modernism.

However, there is also a post-modern aspect to Bioshock. Very frequently, haphazardly as everything else in the ruined city, you can find tape recordings by various major, and minor, characters in the game among the corpses and empty shell casings. These recordings, from multiple points of view help provide the pieces of a seemingly unsolvable puzzle, which help create an understanding of the situation. At the same time, in this itself, is mediation experience. All the the things said in tape recordings were said by people years ago, people who might not even be alive at the moment. Even Atlas, who initially guides you, does not speak to you face to face. And all this 'experience' is then mediated by the television screen the player is looking at. There is as a sense of irony, for when you discover that you were mentally conditioned to comply with Atlas's requests when he utters the phrase 'would you kindly', you never did have a choice. As long as you are playing the game, it is programmed in a way that in essence, all your long term goals are governed by somebodies directions.

I am still in the process of playing this game, so I still do not know how most of the story fits in place. I am very excited, however, to find out.